


Unrecognizable

by rohesia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Friends to almost lovers I guess, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Scott McCall/Kira Yukimura, Non-Sexual Intimacy, POV Scott McCall (Teen Wolf), Pack Feels, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scott post season 4, developing feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26081317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohesia/pseuds/rohesia
Summary: He gives himself over to Stiles’ touch and trusts him to take care of him. It feels like he’s sacrificing some small part of himself and getting something greater in return; Kate forcing the bear skull over his face had felt like an unmeasurable loss, like a violation of something so basic and human its reverberations still rattle him to his core and make him feel cold all over. Stiles’ hands are hot and set him on fire, purifying him.
Relationships: Scott McCall/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70





	Unrecognizable

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the lovely anon who sent me this prompt: "I don't want to be alone". Thank you so much for the request, I hope you like this. I wanted - tried - to write something "shippier" but this was the final result and I hope their developing feelings for each other still managed to shine through. 
> 
> This also gave me the chance to explore Scott's feelings after being turned into a Berserker by Kate and it was gut-wrenching. I doubt Scott would come out of that experience without any scar and the show didn't really let him deal with any of it (surprise surprise) so here it is. 
> 
> Enjoy!

_ But you are about to become something unrecognizable to your friends… _

The story of his supernatural life, except Kate took it to an unimaginable extreme and Scott knows this is something that could make it hard for him to sleep, to focus, to _ lead _ . 

The mindless rage and the bestial bloodlust still linger in the veil of sweat covering his body, in the dust hidden in the folds of his clothes, in his hands, where he feels the absence of blood, of flesh, of something, anything. Something to grab, to tear apart and plunge his claws into. Then he feels something, warm and soft, and his right hand closes around Kira’s side, the rest of her body pressed close against his. 

_ How did she get so close, _ he thinks, in a daze. Why isn’t he attacking her? 

It lasts less than a second but it’s enough to make his breath hitch in the back of his throat and it takes all of his control not to push Kira away, dislodging her from his side, where her body heat tells him of the steady drumming of her heart, pumping blood through her veins and filling her with life. 

_ I almost killed her. I almost killed everyone.  _ The fresh memories come back to him and all he feels is  _ its  _ frustration. The Berserker, not long gone, growls in a corner of his mind and it’s so hungry.

_ They almost killed me. _ The Berserker doesn’t care. It doesn’t know anything except hunger and blood. Scott cares and it gives him a bitter sort of relief. He knows self-sacrifice and guilt.

It’s almost a relief when Kira untangles herself from his arms and walks towards Malia. 

Hands empty again, his mind clears and arrays a collection of flashing memories in front of him, turning the desert, stretched out for miles and miles in front of him, into a blood-stained battlefield and his friends in tantalizing preys. Scott shakes his head, twice, and breathes them all in, dissecting every scent and breaking them down to their essence: exhaustion and relief overcome everything else; anxiety vibrates all around him without exploding, yet, into a stomach-turning, acrid stench. The smell of fear is almost stagnant, but it spikes up irregularly, every time their minds catch up again with reality, probably. 

And then he smells Stiles, leaving out the chemosignals. His natural scent, his stale body wash and his sweat mixed with dust and dirt and death. It’s not nice and it shouldn’t be comforting, but it settles his stomach and his spiraling thoughts, until it’s quiet and the emptiness in his hands stops feeling like a curse he needs to break.

It’s the only thing he lets himself have before climbing into the Jeep, pressing himself against the opposite door, unwilling to spend the entire ride home fighting against the Berserker’s instinct and his own every time his buzzing skin comes into contact with either Kira’s body or Liam’s. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Kira, having climbed out of the car, circles it and opens the door he’s leaning against, resting a hand on his shoulder and making him jump. 

“Hey,” she says, softly. “Budge up. Liam and I decided to share.”

Scott’s brows burrow and then he hears Liam tapping his hand on the cushion next to him, inviting Scott to move closer to the middle of the seat, expression open and soft. 

I almost killed everyone, Scott thinks again. But Kira’s hand doesn’t leave his shoulder, her fingertips pressing against the back of his neck, in soothing and encouraging circles. Liam sighs and moves closer to grab Scott’s wrist, without pulling. 

“I’m gonna pass out soon,” he says, with a tired smile “and I’d rather cuddle you than the window or your girlfriend, so… Come on,” and then he pulls, gently. 

“Same here,” Kira echoes, grinning at both of them. 

Scott hears Stiles slamming the door to the driver’s seat shut and the jingling sound of his keys. Malia is going through the glove box and she gives an excited squeak when she pulls out a pack of beef jerky that’s probably been there since Stiles’ mom owned the car, but she doesn’t seem to mind, just like her supernatural digestive system.

“With great power comes great cuddleability, buddy,” Stiles says, kneeling on his seat, with his hands dangling over the headrest. His eyes fix Scott with a casual stare, but it’s also watchful, like he’s reading Scott like a book and he’s decided he doesn’t like where the story is going. “Humor them and let’s get the hell out of here, yeah? Before Malia gets food poisoning or tries to eat the upholstery.”

_ Let them take care of you and let’s get  _ you  _ the hell out of here before I decide to take out Peter’s unconscious body from the trunk and tear it to pieces. _

Scott doesn’t need Stiles to spell it out for him. Even the unsaid is hardly ever left unspoken between them. It’s how he knows he’s himself and not something else, something unrecognizable. So he lets Stiles bring him back and Liam pull him in, fingers still wrapped around his wrist, while Kira climbs in and shuts the door.

“Want some?” Malia asks, shoving the beef jerky under Scott’s nose as she chews on one strip. She looks at him expectantly. “Stiles says sharing is caring, or whatever.” It smells like something died in there several times over. They all look at her with a mixture of pride and queasiness. Stiles is actually beaming.

“We’re good. But thanks,” they chant in one voice. Malia shrugs one shoulder and turns back around, putting her feet on the dashboard, and starts chewing on a new strip.

“Maybe we should have some,” Stiles says, after a moment’s consideration. “Coach is going to kill us when we get back, so…”

Scott groans, but it doesn’t sound so bad. He smiles at Stiles in the rearview mirror and Stiles grins back. 

If he closes his eyes he can almost pretend they’re on a road trip and the exhaustion turns into a pleasant weariness, letting him slide peacefully into a dreamless sleep. Kira and Liam, snuggled on either side of him, heads lulling on his shoulders every time Stiles hits a bump in the road, are a solid and warm comfort that Scott welcomes in quiet thanks as they make their way home.

  
  


\---

_ They won't know what they're fighting. Or killing. _

Home barely feels like home. Kate follows him there, taking with her the clattering sound of bear bones and her taunting laugh. 

Tendrils of steam rise from his coffee mug, the scalding ceramic against his palms a quiet comfort as Scott sinks into a worn-out armchair, hot liquid sloshing dangerously and settling without spilling. He doesn’t notice. He’s not in his drawing room anymore, his surroundings shrinking down along with his vision range and his breathing coming out in labored rasps. 

_ Kill _ , he hears. It sounds like Kate’s voice, but a moment later he doesn’t know who Kate is and the voice turns into an overwhelming pounding behind his temples, filling his eyes with red and his mouth with fangs. He tastes blood and finally an animalistic instinct kicks in, breaking the chains keeping him anchored to this foreign, annoying softness. He growls and dives forward, anywhere but here, anything but this stillness, and when his hands start burning and blistering the pounding becomes louder, more erratic, and he roars, tumbling on the carpet.

It’s sudden and unexpected enough he’s able to come back to himself, partly, coffee spilled all over and slowly cooling down on his already healing hands. He stays anchored to the smell of coffee, lying in it and letting it soak his clothes, and on the frenzied beating of his heart. Kate’s voice, mocking and luring, echoes through the house, or maybe just his mind, like she’s flinging bloody bait pellets across the water, waiting for him to bite. 

By the time he picks up another furious heartbeat, making his claws desperately dig into his own palms as some part of his mind recognizes the familiar rhythm and latches onto it, trusting it to pull him out of the water, the coffee has gone cold and the blisters on his hands have healed.

“Scott!”

_ Stiles. _ Who’s Stiles and why does he know his name. Why is his body automatically turning towards the sound of his scampering feet and sinking down on the floor in relief? It doesn’t last long: someone -  _ Stiles  _ \- is touching him, lifting him up and propping him up against the armchair. Scott feels his body being moved, touched… comforted? Something warm and pleasant propagates from the small of his back to his shoulders, in growing, continuous waves, and he lets them wash him over as he comes back to himself, slowly and surely. 

Then Stiles comes back, piece after piece. His voice whispering into his ear, the tip of his nose brushing Scott’s cheek, his forehead pressed against Scott’s temple, his hands painting shapeless figures all over his back and warming him up. 

“Stiles…?” Scott croaks, eyes still closed. 

He doesn’t want to open them and see the red again. He doesn’t want Stiles to see the red and scare him away. 

“Hey, I got you,” Stiles breathes out. “I got you, come on… Can you get up?”

Scott gives himself a few minutes and puts his head between his knees, counting his breaths and drawing them to the slow rhythm of Stiles’ hand moving along his back. It’s like when he used to have panic attacks and Stiles would climb into bed with him and pull him against his chest, telling him to breathe, over and over, to listen to his heart and focus on that, beating against Scott’s back. Sometimes he’d pull Scott up and force him into a sitting position, retrieving his inhaler from the bedside table, telling apart panic and asthma, knowing when the former would trigger the latter. 

When his breathing stabilizes and his mind manages to reach back in time, beyond the present moment, re-connecting to reality, he asks:

“When did you get here?”

Stiles gives a pained laugh and his hand closes into a fist in the fabric of his shirt.

“Well, you howled. Or roared, it was different than your usual… but I heard you and almost crashed the Jeep into Mrs Morley’s yard. She also heard you, by the way. She’s probably calling my dad now, so you know… We should probably keep this from Liam, like he needs any more ammunition against us, the little shit. Thank god he’s out of town with his folks...” 

Scott lets Stiles’ voice lull him, welcomes the rushing, rambling words as they rebuild his world around him and make sense of everything. His heart is still beating at a furious pace, making his ribcage rattle, but at least it feels like his heart and not like a beast trying to take him over, hungry and other.

Scott remembers roaring, he remembers the Berserker roaring, not himself. He doesn’t ask Stiles what he’d sounded like and just nods his head in understanding and in thanks, tilting to the side to let Stiles wrap his arms around his middle and help him up when he feels ready. He keeps his eyes closed.

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

The howl still resounds in his mind, even as he tries to shake the memory away, and Scott feels it charging again in his stomach, fighting to get out, like a wounded animal dragging himself to safety. But Stiles’ arms are already around his waist and that’s as safe as he’s gonna get. It should be the other way around and the thought sends tendrils of icy guilt through his stomach and down his legs, making him wobble.

_ I don’t want to be alone _ , he thinks. Must have thought as he’d roared. Desperately. He lets Stiles guide him up the stairs, gratefulness and shame collapsing onto each other.

He doesn’t realize he’s said that out loud until they reach the landing and Stiles, voice tight, whispers: “You’re here, Scott. You’re with me.”

  
  


“Have you been sleeping? At all?” Stiles asks him, not questioning Scott’s closed eyes, as he strips him of his shirt, pulling it over his head as Scott obligingly lifts his arms, and dumps it in the laundry basket at his feet. 

Scott snorts. It’d be pretty stupid to pretend otherwise after his recent episode. “No. You?”

Stiles snorts back. “Nope.” 

Exhaustion and anxiety come off his body in strong waves, combining with Scott’s in a dizzying cocktail. He shouldn’t even be able to stand, neither of them should. Force of habit, Scott thinks, bitterly. Their bodies turned into battlefields a long time ago and the war is never really over, not even when the blood stops flowing and the dust settles back on the ground. It rages and it rages. 

He thinks about the Nogitsune and the dark circles reappearing under Stiles’ eyes, from time to time. Guilt hits him like a freight-train. He should be grateful for his bloodless hands. He should be grateful it’d only taken him a day to break free.

“Argent is going to find her,” Stiles says in a flat but hard voice, kneeling at Scott’s feet to peel off his socks. It’s not meant to put his mind at ease, just a safe, almost neutral, way to voice his destructive anger while offering unshakeable support at the same time. 

“I know,” Scott whispers. 

A lump forms in his throat, needles prickling against his closed eyelids. He feels Stiles hand resting on his right calf, squeezing, and he wants to look down at Stiles looking up at him, but then Stiles stands back up and Scott follows the heat emanating from his body, lifting his head until it’s level with Stiles’.

He doesn’t need to open his eyes to guess what Stiles looks like right now. Scott hears him sigh, soft puffs of hair landing on his nose and on his lips; then he hears him shrug, releasing tension and swallowing down a frustrated groan when it doesn’t fall to the ground and instead climbs back up, settling around his shoulders again, like a persistent, annoying bird of prey. Scott’s lips curve into a sad smile. Stiles murmurs a dejected  _ yeah  _ and his hands come resting around Scott’s waist.

“Just a heads-up,” Stiles warns him, feigning cheerfulness. “I’m taking your pants off.”

Scott laughs, not faking it, at least for half a second. “Knock yourself out.”

Stiles’ hands don’t really feel out of place or awkward around the waistband of his sweats, pulling down without a second thought. Scott lifts one leg, then the other, and steps out of his pants. Maybe it’s because he can’t see Stiles or maybe it’s just so intimate and familiar it makes something inside of him ache, washing away the guilt. It’s something freely-given and pure and he would stain it by accepting it warily, with his hands held up defensively against the onslaught of Stiles’ kindness.

He gives himself over to Stiles’ touch and trusts him to take care of him. It feels like he’s sacrificing some small part of himself and getting something greater in return; Kate forcing the bear skull over his face had felt like an unmeasurable loss, like a violation of something so basic and human its reverberations still rattle him to his core and make him feel cold all over. Stiles’ hands are hot and set him on fire, purifying him. 

He opens his eyes as even the last layer of his clothes comes off and Stiles starts pushing him towards the shower, water already running hot and steam rising all around them. It softens the light a bit, so his eyes don’t hurt as they adjust. 

“Thanks,” he says, voice low and raspy. 

Stiles finds his eyes, stilling for a moment as he takes Scott in, like he’s finally realizing how intimate this all feels only now that they’re looking at each other and that’s the last barrier. Scott gladly climbs over it and basks in the warmth of Stiles’ gaze. It’s easier than anything. He hates Kate for taking that away from him, even if only for a few hours. 

“Get in there, that back ain’t gonna wash itself.”

  
  


When his Mom comes back home from her shift at the hospital she’s not surprised to find Stiles in the kitchen - looking more like a war zone at the moment, but still, a very appetizing one - making dinner as Scott sets the table, cladded in fresh clothes, hair still damp from his shower. She smiles at them and gives a delighted gasp when she smells Stiles’ cooking, cracking a joke about them not setting the house on fire and running upstairs for a quick shower. 

For a moment Scott feels fifteen and normal again, the Berserker a distant memory that hasn’t happened yet. Then Stiles holds out a wooden spoon to his lips and waits for his opinion with a confident grin that could either mean food orgasm or food poisoning and Scott feels seventeen again, but he doesn’t know what it means. Just like he doesn’t know what the hell he’s just tasted and ingested, but he still smiles and mmhms around the spoon. 

He stares at Stiles’ back for a long time as he busies himself around the burning stoves, talking incessantly all the while, gesticulating wildly and repainting the kitchen’s walls with tomato sauce. He turns around from time to time to catch Scott’s reactions to his terrible jokes, or to check on him, only to find Scott already staring, almost waiting. Neither of them mind.

  
  


Scott is grateful when Stiles finishes placing the clean dishes back into the cupboard and relaxes back against the kitchen counter, giving Scott a complicit grin, that could either mean “wanna play videogames all night” or “wanna go look for a dead body in the woods.” Whatever it is, it doesn’t mean “I’m heading out, see you tomorrow.” Whatever it is, it also means “Of course I’m staying the night, I’m not leaving you alone.” 

  
  


His mattress dips under the weight of their two bodies, collapsing on it at the same time, sideways, silence falling all around them.

“You okay?” 

Scott wants to say no. Then yes.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs instead, honestly. 

Nothing pulsates angrily against his temples and his vision stays clear, like his breathing and his heartbeat. He doesn’t know how long that’s gonna last and the not knowing, the blindness, is almost worse than the red. How is he going to keep anyone safe if he can’t even trust his own mind to keep  _ him  _ safe from himself? 

There’s a stranger chipping away at pieces of his soul, turning him into something different and monstrous when he’s not looking. It’s not like the wolf, because the wolf isn’t a part of him, the wolf  _ is _ him and it’s been a long time since Scott has had to make space for it in his body, in his mind, in his soul. They merged seamlessly. 

The supernatural connection he and Peter used to share is long gone and there’s nothing he could do - trying to kill him, trying to take his powers - that could change this. And maybe that’s why Peter hasn’t been haunting his nightmares lately. Scott has rejected him completely, overpowered him and beat him at his own game. 

The Berserker is a different story. It’s mindless and voracious, in a way Peter couldn’t be even at his worst. 

And there’s something frighteningly similar in Kate’s hatred. In the way she’d restrained him and forced him to listen to her and then laughed at his anguished screams, turning him into a monster. She’d relished every moment. How do you beat something like that? How do you force it out? How do you take your body back? 

He’d come back, he’d beaten the blind hunger and ripped the armor from his body and that’s more than most people could say.  _ No one comes back, but you did, and that’s what you hold onto,  _ Argent had told him before taking off with the Calaveras. 

Scott feels the bear skull hovering over his head. 

What if coming back isn’t enough? 

He jolts when Stiles smashes a hand over his eyes. Scott instinctively covers it with his own. “I’m going to start quoting the Lord of the Rings if you don’t stop that,” Stiles threatens. 

“And don’t--”

“Sor--” 

“...apolog-- oh my god.”

Scott thinks sorry, again, but doesn’t voice it. He knows Stiles hears it anyway. They both sigh. Stiles doesn’t take off his hand and neither does Scott, their warm weight keeping the crimson darkness at bay.

When he feels calmer he shifts on his side, mirroring Stiles’ position and Stiles’ hand drops on the mattress, fingertips close enough to brush against the tip of Scott’s nose. 

“I’m here,” he whispers. Then he says he again, louder.

“Good,” Stiles says. 

They stare at each other in silence for a long time, until the darkness recedes. He’s not shrouded in it, he’s not unrecognizable. 

He’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! Any kind of feedback is appreciated <3


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